I plan to join. My goal is to document the methodology that we are using for the Food Systems Lab, a social innovation lab on closing the food loop/reducing food waste in Toronto. The methods from the lab may be useful for other cities wanting to try different collaborative approaches to designing solutions.

@dax great. What about your documentation at Zero-Waste-Labs. Some of it looks quite good already. Maybe it can be extended. And maybe you can share the links with the resources on urban mycology that have inspired/helped you the most.

If you want to, document your project on wikifab and add it to the OSCEdays group.

Wikifab is still in beta. Please send us your experience, thoughts and other feedback on the community forum. What’s missing, what do you love, what would you like to see? We promise to look into it and it really helps us in making the right decisions to improve Wikifab.

Thinking about it, I guess the best form of ‘documentation’ I’ve come across is accidental in the form of a vibrant community (for example: reddit.com/r/mushroomgrowers) - documentation is certainly part of the goal, but it’s more a side effect of the other processes (asking questions, sharing and critiquing methods, discussing ‘best practices’, etc)

documentation is certainly part of the goal, but it’s more a side effect of the other processes (asking questions, sharing and critiquing methods, discussing ‘best practices’, etc)

Yes! that is exactly how I see it. But I think our goal here is to actually inspire people to ask questions - Make them know what they don’t know. Give them an idea where to start, what to think about and if they have questions, where to ask them.

Many of these are start-ups and SMEs, which I think is very exciting, proving that (a) it’s viable and (b) you don’t need a big R&D budget. I have discussed the idea with a few organisations, everyone thinks it’s a good idea but no one wanted to ‘own’ it, so I either need to find a suitable backer or try to make it ‘crowd-sourced’.

I don’t want to ‘own’ it, but would like to help develop it, and have my name associated with it. I have invested a lot of time in the research, in thinking about it, and creating a workable database structure so it is easily searchable with (I think) sensible categories to organise the different aspects of ‘circularity’.

The issue with the existing sites (including Circulate, EMF, Circular Economy Club, consultant sites etc) is that they are not easily searchable, and focus on big corporate stories. My vision is for something that helps answer the question “what can I do with xxxx waste” or “what examples are there in YY sector, for this kind of product, etc”. A kind of global ‘one stop shop’ for the circular economy. It could have links to case studies etc on other websites, but crucially contain all the key data in one place to make it easier to search. It could also be linked to the detail design documentation from these ‘Docu-Days’

A critical point for me is that it should be open-sourced, to ensure credibility, transparency and trust. There may need to be a small user fee to fund the platform and verification/maintenance (though ideally it would be funded through grants, corporate supporters etc), but users should be able to load their own data, and comment/flag up any issues with their own or other companies data. I’ve got further ideas on those aspects.

I have experience in building a comprehensive knowledge share platform in my role at DHL Supply Chain for our sales and operations teams, with a detailed ‘services’ database.

Maybe we can brainstorm about your project and how you could go about it at the ‘docu days?’ Do you have time to join a video call or text chat this weekend? I would love to brainstorm it and learn more about what you already have.

Myself and @huelfe have written an application to get a grant to make this happen - the IPO tables project is about a simple search engine and documentation format for circular economy solutions. If we are lucky and can work on it maybe some synergies can be found. Would be fantastic.